By Al AlexanderMore Content NowFifty years! Fifty: 5-0! That’s how long it’s been since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It was meant to be the end of government-sponsored racism, but a 2013 Supreme Court ruling pretty much gutted it by allowing states to impose restrictions like voter ID. What does this have to do with the Oscar-baiting “Selma”?

Like a trip through pop music history that ended on the cutting edge, covers from the past five decades of Rolling Stone magazine beamed across the walls of the El Rey Theatre before R&B singer The Weeknd and rapper Childish Gambino took the stage.

Right from the opening scene of the Russian language “Leviathan,” when an aerial shot shows lights coming on at dawn in homes throughout a little coastal town on the Barents Sea, you just know this is going to be a slow, brooding movie (it’s also...